literacies café : adult literacy blog

world water week

2011-08-19T15:28:00.002-04:00

More than 2,600 humanitarians and policymakers meet in Stockholm next week to hash out ideas about how to tackle escalating problems surrounding water scarcity and access to sanitation, particularly in urban environments.

World Water Week delegates are seeking long-term sustainable solutions that will transform how water resources are managed. The goal is to try and improve the lives of almost 900 million people who lack access to safe water, and more than 2.7 billion who lack access to basic sanitation, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) statistics.

Stockholm meeting to stir global water crisis debate by Julie Mollins, AlertNet

i'm loving matt damon

2011-08-02T13:14:00.001-04:00

Matt Damon talks to Piers Morgan about President Obama, audacity and the difference between training and education!

Matt Damon gets it. He understands why "training" is not good enough for our kids.

What about adult literacy practitioners and policy makers? Do we understand the difference between training and education? I think we do.

It seems to me that more and more we are choosing training instead of education for adult literacy learners. Is that true? Is it what adult literacy learners want?

failure and mastery

2011-03-17T01:14:00.000-04:00

In this video from TED, Slaman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

And more importantly, how to structure learning that rewards experimentation, encourages risk, AND results in mastery. Pretty cool.

an historical gaze

2011-03-08T11:49:00.001-05:00

This just in from the Reuters Live Blog:

At Centre Pompidou in Paris, in Elles, a women-only exhibit I (Katherine Govier) found this quote from the French artist Michelle Perrot’s “Preface a Une Historie des Femmes, est-elle Possible?”

“It is not a matter of establishing some new territory for women, a peaceful reservation where they might desport themselves at ease without fear of contradiction; it is rather a question of changing the direction of the historical gaze, placing the relationship between the sexes at the center of concern.”

Do you call yourself a feminist?

2011-03-08T10:49:00.000-05:00

Annie Lennox says:

Despite the fact that half of the world’s population is female, women’s rights have become marginalized as a ‘minority issue’. Many young women feel that the label of ‘feminist’ is, at best, irrelevant to their lives and, at worst, a stigma to be avoided at all costs.

Sullied by stereotypes of hairy arm-pitted man haters, the concept of feminism and its principles of equality and anti-sexism need to be refreshed and reclaimed by a new generation. Feminism shouldn’t be an F-word. We should embrace it.

From Milwaukee to Malawi, women are being short-changed on life chances. From India to Illinois, women face violence just for being female. Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, the vast majority are female. For many, just getting an education is a real struggle, major decisions such as who to marry and when to have children are made for them by others, and without economic independence or a say in their own future the chances of women escaping the poverty trap are virtually non-existent.

Whether you’re a woman or a man, this affects you. And you are part of the solution. The impact of inequality is felt by every woman worldwide - your friends, your family, your colleagues, your neighbors, the people you emailed today, the woman in the car next to you, the faces you saw on television and the voices you heard on the radio. How many have been abused or faced discrimination today?

And Mariella Fostrop says:

In the western world the greatest triumph of spin in the last century is reflected in attitudes to feminism. Our struggle for emancipation and equality has been surreptitiously rewritten as a harpy bra-burning contest while elsewhere, in less affluent parts of the world, the response is altogether different. From Mozambique to Chad, South Africa and Liberia, Sierra Leone to Burkina Faso, feminism is the buzzword for a generation of women determined to change the course of the future for themselves and their families. At female gatherings all over sub-Saharan Africa you'll find enthusiasm and eager signatories to the cause. ...

The emancipation of women is the only possible future for the developing world, as it was and continues to be for us. There are too many people on this planet for us to be able to afford to leave nearly 50% of them in penury, uneducated and without a voice. Making women equal partners makes sense for both sexes. My profound hope is that we can, men and women alike, work together to create the circumstances in which International Women's Day can become the cause for celebration it should be.

100 Years of IWD

2011-03-02T12:57:00.001-05:00

It is that time of year again. For the 100th time!

I was working at home last year for the Reuters International Women's Day live blog (see details below) and spent quite a bit of time over there reading and talking about where women are today. It was fascinating. If you are using computers with your class on March 8, this might be a fun thing to check out.

There are some good videos here: www.trust.org/trustlaw/womens-rights/womens-voices that you can watch to get ready for an International Women's Day discussions - either on the live blog below or in your class.

There is some excellent reading at the Trust Law blog: www.trust.org/trustlaw/blogs/100-years-of-international-womens-day

________________________________________________________

Call out to all bloggers and Tweeters for International Women’s Day – 8 March 2011

As part of the Women @ Thomson Reuters network’s focus on International Women's Day, Julie Mollins [my sister] has created a dedicated International Women’s Day web page on reuters.com. Click here to view. Not only does this page bring together great Reuters news content, we also have a fantastic dynamic live blog which will capture insights and perspectives from both staff and external contributors around the world throughout the day.

View our initial blog postings here. We invite you to participate on that live blog.

We have begun to populate dedicated pages on reuters.com and Thomson Reuters Foundation’s site in advance of 8 March with some initial stories. Take a look at the blog posts on Reuters The Great Debate site - please feel free to start adding your own responses to these articles. In addition we also have special coverage on TrustLaw and AlertNet broadening the range of topics and angles for reflection.

This year will be the 100th anniversary of IWD, so perhaps you would like to join the live blog and discuss:

What progress do you believe has been made, or ground lost, on the gender agenda over the past 100 years?

What needs to be achieved over the next decade and into the future?

Thomson Reuters Foundation also launched a new page titled TrustLaw Women this week. View that page and blog your thoughts.

Blog on this year’s IWD 2011 theme which is “Equal access to education, training and science and technology: Pathway to decent work for women”

Perhaps you could attend a local IWD march in your area and tweet back. Check here for a list of activities around the world.

Are you hosting an International Women’s Day event? Celebrate by sharing your Tweets with us. Follow us on Twitter at @women_on_iwd.

We would love to have you contribute on 8^th March and welcome you to “dip in” and blog or tweet throughout the day.

Have a great International Women’s Day!

________________________________________________________

hyperventilating over learning

2011-02-26T11:25:00.000-05:00

Here is a great story about the power of blended learning written in preparation for International Women's Day:

But how can you not hyperventilate? My students, many of them first-generation Americans and the first in their families to attend college, are doing real research. They are doing the research that was previously restricted to scholars who possessed letters of introduction, invitations, and appointments. My students and I have none of these things. We are in a public school during a recession. And yet, we are true researchers.

In the morning, students knock on the library door, begging to be let in. “We open in five minutes!” I call. I savor the first five minutes of the day alone with my coffee cup and my own research. Currently, I am researching Berenice Abbott, the WPA photographer known for her “Changing New York” photographs of the city. Her work is among 700,000 archived materials in New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.

You don’t have to live in New York or own a library card to access the Gallery. Like Google Books—which also digitizes historical books—the Gallery is available to anyone with an internet connection. All you need is five quiet minutes in the morning with your coffee cup—or four, depending on the day.

Today I will only have four minutes. Students are rapping on the door, pounding harder. They want in, and come barreling through.

“Morning, Miss!” “What new books do you have?” “Can I use a laptop?” “Can I borrow headphones?” “How do I embed video in PowerPoint?” “Where are the Shakespeare plays?”

revolutionary literacy

2011-02-15T15:20:00.024-05:00

So what is the state of the debate on whether or not the revolution will be tweeted?

It rages on of course.

I agree with @navalang that a great addition is to be found here in this blog post, Knowing and Unknowing the Egyptian Public, by @zunguzungu.

His argument, if I read him correctly, is that generalizations about how social movements are developed and how they become effective are not helpful in describing the internal rationality of any specific movement or event.

If, as Malcolm Gladwell argues, the success of the American Civil Rights movement can be attributed to strong links among activists and a well-developed hierarchy there is nothing that says that the next, equally effective, civil rights movement could not start with weak ties and a flattened hierarchy.

He goes further to suggest that Western generalizers are reluctant to learn the specifics of movements because they are reluctant about losing their power to create the official story.

We live in an era we can get glimpses of the different ways the stories are being framed. We can read and listen to and watch mainstream media reports side-by-side with what we learn from our fellow "citizen journalists" on Twitter and You Tube. The official analysts can help us organize the information but our own critical literacy skills are forced into high gear as we try to understand the context and the content. These are fine times to be hanging around this little blue planet.

update 2

2011-02-11T12:11:00.002-05:00

As you know, Mubarek's speech yesterday was a huge disappointment to people who are fighting for democracy in Egypt. I guess it was one of those "trial balloons" politicians are so fond of :)

Today at about 6:30 p.m. in Cairo...

egypt update

2011-02-10T12:09:00.003-05:00

Hosni Mubarak 'may step down' - Al Jazeera English (live stream here - Feb. 10 live blog here)

Egypt's Mubarak 'may stand down' - BBC (click on Live tab for updates)

revolution 2.0

2011-02-10T01:00:00.009-05:00

from Three Weeks in Egypt with Alan Taylor (The Atlantic) - John Moore/Getty Images

On October 4, 2010 the New Yorker published this in a piece called Small Change - Why the revolution will not be tweeted by Malcolm Gladwell:

The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

and

The evangelists of social media ... seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

I think the recent use of social media to galvanize a group of web savvy internet users to sign an online petition against a CRTC ruling (that would allow large telecom companies to impose usage based billing on their competition) is an example of how the internet can be an efficient place for communities of interest to come together and advocate. I also think that participating in online referenda about irksome billing policies is qualitatively different than engaging in high-risk activism such as "sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960."

In the case of the anti-UBB petition, the petition signers saw a good result when Minister of Industry Tony Clement tweeted this:

As Gladwell says, the internet can foster a kind of activism but not the kind that requires the activists to develop a strong enough sense of commitment to the cause, and to each other, to support the risk-taking essential to creating deep social change.

On January 27, the day he was to be detained in Egypt, Wael Ghonim tweeted this:

And yesterday he tweeted this:

So what is all that about? Why is this participant in the January 25th uprising in Egypt, an uprising where hundreds of participants have been injured and detained and a number have been killed (there is controversy over the death toll numbers but most put the number at over 100), making this claim? Is it because he works for Google and sees the world through a 2.0 prism? Or is he experiencing a magnification of commitment that occurs when a revolution is tweeted?

I think there's an unmistakable effect that the Internet has had on dissident communities, that it has emboldened them. I recall when I was in the Islamist slums of Cairo, a friend of mine that I started to talk politics with silenced me immediately and said in Arabic (SPEAKING ARABIC) "The walls have ears."
There was a sense of fear in daily life in Egypt. And what I believe the Internet has given to dissidents is the -- the feeling that there are those in the West who care about them, an ability to talk with other people. So, it's a really -- a very empowering feeling that -- that nothing can take away.

David Keyes from CyberDissidents.org on NPR
(see video below - transcript here)

Gladwell might well argue that the ties between the Egyptian protesters and other Twitterverse participants are the weak ties of low-risk activism

but if those ties, however weak, strengthen the commitment and motivation of the people who have ties strong enough to support each other in high-risk activism, perhaps the revolution should be tweeted... and retweeted.

truthiness in canada

2011-02-09T01:41:00.001-05:00

On October 17, 2005, The Colbert Report comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word "truthiness."

Here is how Merriam-Webster defines it:

truthiness (noun)

1 : "truth that comes from the gut, not books" (Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," October 2005)

2 : "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true" (American Dialect Society, January 2006)

On January 10, 2011, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) released a Broadcasting Notice of Consultation which could legitimize truthiness on Canadian airwaves.

The current wording is broad:
[Media outlets are prohibited from broadcasting] any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading.

The proposed change is an addenum to the previous statement:
[Media outlets are prohibited from broadcasting] any news that the licensee knows is false or misleading and that endangers or is likely to endanger the lives, health or safety of the public.

Here is a petition just in case you think we should stick to the original wording.

Keep Canadian Media Honest - Don't Let The CRTC Deregulate Truth in Journalism Petition

Video Games | | Truthiness- The Colbert Report

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

legacy numeracy

2011-02-08T13:33:00.000-05:00

Another legacy of the Reagan presidency, and of all the hawkish regimes everywhere that preceded and followed him, is off the charts military spending.

happy birthday mr. president?

2011-02-07T13:25:00.000-05:00

Last week there were a number of television moments dedicated to reflections about the presidency of Ronald Reagan on what would have been his 100th birthday. I found it all quite bewildering. Here is one of the reasons why:

reading serenity

2011-02-04T13:20:00.001-05:00

Remember Quietube - the people who brought us that nice clean page upon which to view videos?

Well now there is Readability who bring us to nice quiet places to read stuff on the internet. You can sign up and pay a fee, a portion of which goes to the writers you read or you can get a Firefox extension or bookmarklet for free.

These easier-to-read pages are nice for everybody but especially nice for our learners who may struggle to find there way through all the advertorial text, tiny text and flashing bits on so many websites.

(anti?)social media

2011-02-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

Here is a commentary on online personas from Ross Gardner:

literacy by the numbers

2011-02-02T11:06:00.005-05:00

VIDA - Women in Literary Arts - was founded in August 2009 to address the need for female writers of literature to engage in conversations regarding the critical reception of women’s creative writing in our current culture.

They have just published The Count - a breakdown by gender of who writes for some major publications and whose writing gets reviewed by these same publication. Here is one example:

We know women write. We know women read. It’s time to begin asking why the 2010 numbers don’t reflect those facts with any equity. Many have already begun speculating; more articles and groups are pointing out what our findings suggest: the numbers of articles and reviews simply don’t reflect how many women are actually writing. VIDA is here to help shape that discussion. Please tell us about the trends you’ve witnessed in your part of the writing world. Let us know what you think is going on. We’re ready and anxious to hear from you. We’re ready to invest our efforts and energy into the radical notion that women are writers too.

No Canadian publications in The Count. I wonder if The Count would be any different here.

literacy alive

2011-02-01T16:27:00.002-05:00

http://egypt.alive.in/

Volunteers have been working on translating the Arabic voice messages left by Egyptian protesters on Google’s Say Now service (which were then, with the help of Twitter, pushed out as tweets on the @Speak2Tweet account) into English.

reading frenzy

2011-02-01T01:39:00.000-05:00

days of reckoning

2011-01-30T16:33:00.000-05:00

good for the gander

2010-06-28T18:55:00.004-04:00

No comment about the G20 here. Lots of that over on Story Juice. But just wanted to make a note of this comment from a Prime Minister whose government has put a giant kibosh on any opportunities for publicly funded workers to meet, network, or share professional knowledge and expertise.

Even in an age when teleconferences are so easy to organize, said Mr. Harper, there is nothing that can replace getting together with somebody face to face, shaking their hand, talking to them, and understanding their own pressures and concerns.

Harper on the G20: Toronto’s pain, the world’s gain

Maybe Mr. Harper read this :)

hiatus

2010-05-25T18:39:00.003-04:00

Wow. It has been a long time since the last post and there is lots to catch up on but I do not have time now so I thought I'd post something by someone else who took a long time between "posts":

Here is the beginning of this speech about education and creativity.

a nice place to learn

2010-04-15T14:44:00.005-04:00

I went to Belleville yesterday to do a presentation about literacy for a group of people who work in literacy, settlement and employment services. Nice people.

I took the train down in the morning and had to wait until 9:30 until I could get a train home. What to do?

Hang out with the amazing folks at Quinte Adult Day School of course. The staff are Marsha, Gary, Chris, Cory and Stacey and are just what you would expect from literacy workers - funny, compassionate and passionate. And, of course, fantastically smart, innovative and creative.

One thing they do at QADS is work with people on job skills and one of the ways they do that is by restoring the beautiful old buildings of Belleville and Trenton to their former glory ... and into well-appointed places to learn.

Needless to say, I learned a LOT!

Thank you QADS people and thank you Community Literacy Ontario for providing us with this opportunity.

originally posted @ StoryJuice

never stop

2010-04-08T10:43:00.002-04:00

Joanne Kaattari from Community Literacy Ontario sent me this link and I thought I would share it with you too.

I think it is good for those days when everything seems a bit overwhelming and we need a little pep talk (from Morgan Freeman!) about how great we are, how much the world needs our brains and how very possible everything is.

new esl/literacy horizons

2010-03-31T11:02:00.003-04:00

The New American Horizons Foundation has created a couple fantastic videos about teaching ESL/Literacy.

I used the video called "Building Literacy with Adult Emergent Readers," hot off the press, with Teaching English as a Second Language Certificate (TESL) students to show them one way all the elements we cover in the ESL/Literacy component of their course can come together in a classroom.

One thing some TESL students used to say during the ESL Literacy workshops was that they could not see how it all came together -- how it would actually work with real students. As we cannot observe an actual class as part of the workshops, I struggled to figure out how to convey how ESL Literacy classes work. That struggle is over thanks to the good people at the New American Horizons Foundation. The TESL students really enjoyed the video and I noticed that the kind of lesson plans this group submitted showed a deeper understanding of working with ESL Literacy students. A win win. And how often does that happen in literacy :)

Watch the video here or on the NAH site. You can buy the DVD for $5 plus shipping.